The lives sent down the drain

By Don Watson

5 July 2008 — 12:00am

Remote Aboriginal communities are still suffering from the almost incomprehensible neglect and incompetence of government.

UNTIL 40 or 50 years ago, thousands of Australian children were educated in schools consisting of one room and one teacher. Classes of less than a dozen were common. That the schools were in remote areas did not matter. Australian children had a right to education regardless of where they lived. It was an all but universal principle: education bestowed benefits on individuals and society that easily outweighed the cost of providing it. Among other things, it was the means by which children might escape the poverty of their parents and raise healthier and more adept offspring of their own.

To this end, Australian governments made education free and compulsory, and as the logical proof of their good faith, built and maintained these little rural schools and trained, paid and housed the teachers.

Students did not leave these schools with much command of physics or the classics, but they were numerate and literate. They were not qualified for university. But they could read a newspaper or a book or a summons or a form from the government. They could write a letter or read one from their mothers, prepare an invoice, measure distances, add, subtract, multiply and divide and point to Sydney on a map.

And having these abilities, should they wish, they could further educate themselves, and inevitably they did.

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These things are proverbial and we are well past needing to mention them in any conversation about education or "education revolutions". But among Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, they are for all practical purposes unknown.

Children on Aboriginal homelands grow up unable to do any of the things that eight years in a remote school 50 years ago taught kids to do. At a homeland 250 kilometres west of Gove, the teacher comes three days a week sometimes, and sometimes only two. On the other days, educating the children falls to the Aboriginal assistant teacher who lives with her family next to the school. She is bright and dedicated, but very young and untrained and cannot exercise the authority of a qualified and experienced teacher.

So for half of most school weeks the kids muck about in the grass and dust outside the new school. You can feel their future ebbing away  like the community tank, which has been leaking for 2½ years and empties itself every night. The children have spoken English vocabularies of perhaps 50 words. As each day the rest of Australia's children learn something new and build on what they learned the hour, the day, the week, the year before, these children learn nothing and have nothing to build on. They play and laugh, and the gap grows wider and hope fades by the minute.

It's not for want of a school. The old school, built with funds from Rotary, is still in good condition, and the new school finished just last year is cool and well-equipped. There's a new house for the teacher, a telephone, television, shower and flushing toilet.

It's not that the parents don't want the kids to go to school, or that the kids don't want to go. The new school was built by the Northern Territory Government and opened by the then minister for education because for a while two years ago 37 kids were attending the old one. At the same time, a dozen teenagers and young men were learning trade skills and English in a new workshop funded by Melbourne charities and built by volunteers and the homeland people. Education is what everyone wants on this homeland, and English  they are, they say, "trapped by the language".

It's not for want of a teacher. They have a first-rate teacher who receives a full-time salary to teach full-time at the community. And this, she says, is what she wants to do. But, by all reports, the college on Elcho Island responsible for the homeland is primarily concerned with national benchmarks and university entrance standards. No one on the homeland has any chance of doing that. The college has decreed that homeland teachers will spend only five or six days a fortnight in the classroom, and the other days in classroom "preparation". We were told that the school principal believes doing more would "set a precedent".

While the schoolteacher comes barely half time, the trade teacher no longer comes at all. He was taken away because the college insists that the workshop is not a bona fide educational facility. The young men who were learning skills and English have drifted away to join the wayward, lost and hopeless in the larger centres.

The homeland parents could move to one of these places. The nearest to this homeland is 1½ hours away. There's a school there with teachers present five days a week. Perhaps the federal intervention will force them there eventually. But the parents do not want to go. The homeland is safer and measurably healthier, and in all ways save education, better for children. So much better, parents in the bigger centres send their children to relatives in the homelands.

We might wonder why, if it does not intend to provide teachers, the Northern Territory Government builds schools and ministers of education fly out to open them. The answer is, they're not schools. It's a sort of trick, you see. They're community learning centres. And CLCs don't get teachers in the way that schools do.

With two school buildings and playground equipment and kids running around, education is not the first thing to register when you get there. The leaking tank, the overflowing long-drop lavatory that serves two families and the pool of parasite-infested sewage and water between their houses have a more immediate effect on the mind than the absence of any activity in the schoolroom. These things, despite repeated requests, have never been fixed: not by the NT Government departments whose officials were led to them three years ago, not by the Homeland Resource Centre and, so far, not by the federal intervention.

What registers is the almost incomprehensible neglect and incompetence of government, its bizarre bureaucracies and its corrupt contractors. Looking at the putrefaction, hearing the stories and meeting the bureaucrats, it is not education that comes to mind, but cannonballs landing on that grotesque Parliament in Darwin.

Without warning, an official from the Homeland Resource Centre drops in from the sky in a plane. Ignoring such futile proprieties as introducing herself to the owners of the land, with her two Yolngu assistants she strides to the schoolroom, there to enrol eligible people for the Community Development Employment Projects. They emerge in the early afternoon, having enrolled eight people. A ninth who, like the others, did not know they were coming, is 120 kilometres away. After the officials have gone, we hear he is walking back in the hope of catching them.

The Homeland Resource Centre official reads to us from a list that purports to show how often the centre has sent tradesmen to repair and maintain the basic services and how often the people of the homeland have wrecked the services. She is determined to add reproof to deprivation: they can't be trusted with tractors or mowers or toilets or machinery of any kind. But very little of her story tallies with voluminous records kept by the community's volunteer organiser or with the memory of the people.

Nor does it tally with the long-drop, the broken septic system or the tank. The truth is that in three years all the resources of the Northern Territory and the Commonwealth and all the employees housed in sleek offices have not been able to dig a hole  to take an auger and dig a hole, or take it and let the local people dig the hole.

The homeland resources person boards her plane. It's not her fault. She is just another cog, one of hundreds, with good will and bad, fecklessly turning in the worthless Northern Territory machine.

This is the machine the federal intervention ought to fix. It has brought to the district a new general manager with energy, goodwill and openness. These communities would not face even half the problems they do if half-a-dozen bureaucrats made up their minds one Monday morning to fix them before the end of the week.

That remains the promise of the intervention  but only just. In the first 10 months its officers visited the homeland four times. Once to deliver a summons to a young man charged with driving an unroadworthy car and failing to wear a seatbelt in a town 300 kilometres away that he was  demonstrably  not in at the time. Once to investigate a rumour that the same young man was having sexual relations with a minor  who, as it happens, was at least 23 years old. A third time to deliver the summons again. And the fourth, despite the protestations and humiliation of the homeland elders for whom such things are unimaginable, to investigate malicious rumours of child sexual abuse  a crime that no one associated with the homeland in its 40-year history has ever seen a sign of.

Knowing the community well, the visiting nurse did not believe the rumours, but decided to conduct her own examinations and tests. She found no evidence of child abuse or sexually transmitted diseases.

The intervention has conducted 7433 health checks on children in remote Aboriginal communities and has reported 39 at risk of abuse or neglect. Nationally, last year, protection agencies received 310,000 notifications: 58,000 were substantiated.

Thirty-nine is about the same number of children needing to be saved from illiteracy on this one homeland. As one volunteer said, if only the residents had some beer cans (and rum bottles) to throw around, if only the settlement had looked more like bedlam, perhaps the intervention would have stayed to fix the water tank, the septic system and the long-drop. And then, who knows, they might have noticed the kids were not in school and the young men who remained after the trade teacher left had nothing to do.

There's a lot of debate about education in the Northern Territory. In some places they can't get the kids to go to school, so politicians  including the federal minister  talk about forcing the issue by making money or food or work dependent on attendance. Everywhere ideologues and educationists argue about whether they should be taught in their traditional languages or in conjunction with English or in advance of it, or not at all.

Bureaucrats argue about who is responsible for education. A person from a federal body called the Indigenous Co-ordination Centre told us in the boardroom of an elegant new building in Gove that, while the aim of the centre was to see that money got to the "grassroots", her organisation was not responsible for education. Nor was it responsible for any failings of the Homeland Resource Centre, which means it's not responsible for roads, sanitation, machinery, fuel or food. Nor, although it boasts a health solutions broker, does it give any sign of being responsible for health. So what are you responsible for, we asked? What do you co-ordinate? The "different buckets of money", we were told. They co-ordinate the buckets and the movement of people between them, it seems, and the impressive thing is that they do it from the new building with the internal security doors and the plasma TVs. Like the health solutions broker we met six months earlier, the ICC person had never seen the grassroots of a homeland.

It seems simple. The NT Government ought to educate these people. Since it is not, the Federal Government should do it. And if it can't do it, it should outsource it to New Zealand, which seems to hold more strongly to its founding beliefs.

At Gove airport, a bevy of teenage schoolkids and teachers, all of them white, were on their way to walk the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea. Among them was a man who looked very like the former minister for education who less than two years ago opened the new homeland school. He was wearing the same blue T-shirt as all the others with the words "courage, endurance, mateship"  all the great Australian values  written across the back.